Jotting swiftly, Robinson noted: “If the Russians are willing to open up, then the wall must go. Open the Brandenburg Gate.” He wrote so fast that he mistakenly attributed the comment to Strauch. The idea of getting rid of the Wall “represented a sudden illumination, almost a detonation,” he later said.
Robinson had the core of Reagan’s speech: Get rid of the Wall. Returning to Washington, he started writing and rewriting. He had trouble getting the phrasing precisely right. Over the weeks leading up to the speech, he tried different variations of the key sentence. One draft had: “Herr Gorbachev, bring down this wall.” Another: “Herr Gorbachev, machen Sie diesses Tor auf,”* which translated to “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.” The next: “Come here, to this gate. Herr Gorbachev, reissen Sie diese Mauer neider,” which translated to “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Another draft combined the German exhortation to open the gate with the English one to tear down the Wall. That survived until a week before the speech was to be delivered.
Dolan, director of speechwriting since Elliott’s departure, realized that while talking about tearing down the Wall might appeal to Reagan, it would cause a furor with the foreign policy establishment and White House staff. Robinson and he both knew that if they were not careful, the president might never see the line—it would be taken out by staffers before it reached the president. Dolan held a war council of the speechwriting staff: This is going to be the toughest fight we’ve ever had, he told them. They alerted all of their allies inside and outside the administration who had any influence. “We knew that there would be volcanic explosions” among the moderates when they saw the language, Rohrabacher recalled.
The Berlin stop was one on a nine-day trip. The speechwriters all worked to get their drafts done at the same time, but Dolan waited until late on Friday, May 15, before sending them out for the president’s weekend reading material. The speechwriters reasoned that the senior staff would not be able to read through the whole pile of speeches before Reagan left for the weekend. The other speeches were in effect a convoy for the Berlin Wall speech.
The following Monday, the writers met with the president in the Oval Office to discuss the speeches. The great hope at each such meeting was that Reagan would engage on a topic and give the writer something he could drop into a speech. Josh Gilder had been tapped to write the speech at the Vatican, and he asked the president what role he thought religion might play in reforming Eastern Europe. Reagan engaged, and Gilder used his remarks almost verbatim as a couple of paragraphs in the speech.* Robinson told the president that the broadcast of his Berlin speech would reach into East Germany and the Soviet Union, possibly as far as Moscow, and wondered if there was anything the president would like to say. Reagan cocked his head and thought. “Well, there’s that passage about tearing down the wall,” he said. “That wall has to come down. That’s what I’d like to say to them.”†
Robinson was crushed. He wanted a new pearl, not a rehash of what was already in the speech. He did not immediately realize that Reagan had given him a key tool: with the presidential imprimatur, he could withstand pressure to excise the phrase. And there was pressure: as the speech came back from successive rounds of staffing, the section would be scratched out by the NSC or State. Or it would be changed: Kornblum, the Berlin diplomat, suggested: “One day, this ugly wall will disappear.” What did that mean, Robinson wondered, “That the wall would just get up and slink off of its own accord?”
On June 1, the National Security Council’s Colin Powell sent a memorandum to White House communications director Tom Griscom about the speech. “We still believe that some important thematic passages (e.g., pp. 6–7 [which contained the key line]) are wrong,” he wrote. Powell and the others worried that it would be an affront to Gorbachev and ruin the budding good relations with the Soviets. They asked: Would we like it if Gorbachev came to the United States and told us what to do?* On several occasions, Griscom took the question back to the president—he told Reagan that there were many objections to the line and asked whether he was sure that he wanted it in. At one point he brought the president the murkier State Department language, causing Reagan to roll his eyes.
Griscom was summoned to the office of White House chief of staff Howard Baker—who had replaced Regan in February 1987, and thought the line “unpresidential”—where Secretary of State George Shultz was waiting. Progress has been made with the Soviets, Shultz said, and this could reverse it or end it entirely. Griscom stood his ground: He had heard Reagan read the line out loud, he said, and knew the president wanted it. It will work, he said.
There were further attempts to remove the line even after the president had left Washington for his European trip, but Reagan remained steadfast. “The boys at State are going to kill me,” he told deputy chief of staff Ken Duberstein, “but it’s the right thing to do.”
Reagan could hear anger in his own voice as he spoke the key lines. His ire was not directed at Gorbachev but rather at the East German police. Just before he spoke, they had forced people on their side of the Wall away from the loudspeakers so that they could not hear him.
“There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace,” Reagan said, stumbling over “dramatically.”
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate [he paused while twenty-five seconds of the crowd’s cheers spent themselves]. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
When Josh Gilder went to Moscow in 1988, it elicited little reaction from the Washington bureaucrats, but he did have a run-in with the Soviet variety. Gilder was writing the speech Reagan would give at Moscow State University on his May trip for a summit there. Reagan and Gorbachev had signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in December in Washington, and now the president was preparing for a victory lap in Moscow. The speech at the university would be the showcase of the trip.
The Moscow University building struck Gilder as being out of a “science fiction nightmare”—grim, scary, totalitarian architecture. A school official showed him the auditorium, which was dominated by a mural celebrating the October Revolution; in front was a huge bust of Lenin. You’re going to have to move the bust and cover the mural, Gilder told the school official. Ronald Reagan giving a speech in front of a bust of Lenin—was the guy joking? The school official looked distraught. He excused himself to check, leaving Gilder alone with his thoughts. The more he pondered, the more he thought that it actually would be pretty amazing for Ronald Reagan to stand in front of those icons and deliver a speech about freedom. The functionary was overjoyed when Gilder told him to leave the mural and Lenin where they were.
“Standing here before a mural of your revolution, I want to talk about a very different revolution that is taking place right now, quietly sweeping the globe without bloodshed or conflict,” Reagan told the students at Moscow State University on May 31, 1988.
Its effects are peaceful, but they will fundamentally alter our world, shatter old assumptions, and reshape our lives. It’s easy to underestimate because it’s not accompanied by banners or fanfare. It’s been called the technological or information revolution, and as its emblem, one might take the tiny silicon chip, no bigger than a fingerprint. One of these chips has more computing power than a roomful of old-style computers.
“Dear Mr. President, these are my thoughts.”
At the end of 1988 Reagan was preparing to leave the White House, handing over the government to President-elect George H. W. Bush. Peggy Noonan had been given one last chance to work with her hero, much to the irritation of others still in the administration who wanted to write the final speech. Reagan had asked for her help with his hail and farewell, and she had written him a letter to start him thinking. He should find new ways to say old things, she told him, and he should think of the speech as a “tone poem a
imed at subtly reminding people what a giant you are.” For the first time since JFK, the American people were losing a president that they could love.
“They love you, Mr. President, but you’re still a mystery man to them in some respects,” she wrote. “We’re going to reveal more of you than they’ve seen in the past, mostly by talking about big things in a personal and anecdotal way.”
“They” were the American people, but “they” were also Peggy Noonan. For eight years, Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters had had diminishing access to a president who was remote from even his closest aides. He had presented a clear ideology and style so they had gotten his voice even though they might go months without seeing him. They knew him and in many cases they loved him. But he remained a mystery.
Noonan met with Reagan five times in December 1988 and January 1989. He had sat amiably as she laid out her vision of the speech—“a sort of Jim Cagney kind of view,” Mari Maseng, back as the communications director, recalled—but did not like it. They worked out a theme and Noonan wrote. She spent a week working on a couple of poetic endings to the speech, one about the magic of the White House and one about the city on the hill. “But at the end I admitted to myself: both endings had more to do with me than RR,” she wrote to Maseng on January 1.
Next to this part of the note, she had written in the margin, “I got to know him,” but then scratched it out. In her memoir, she noted: “The attempt to elicit some kernel of unknown information yielded little. I would never know him, but now I thought I knew why. He did not need to be known. He did not need to ease his loneliness, if that is what he had.”
On January 11, 1989, Noonan sat in the Oval Office. For the first time, she was going to watch Reagan deliver a speech in person there. As technicians bustled around, he started reading his speech out loud: even the great ones have to practice. Then, just before airtime, he nodded his head down and closed his eyes. “What is he doing?” Noonan asked Maseng. “He’s praying,” the communications director responded. He opened his eyes, lifted his head, and with a wink toward the two women, began:
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
Noonan got her city on the hill after all.
Ronald Reagan was known as the “Great Communicator,” and had a deep appreciation of the power of words. Especially at the start of his tenure in the White House, he spent a great deal of time carefully selecting and honing those words. But there was often conflict in the process that produced those words—a surprising amount for an administration so well known for its powerful rhetoric and clear style.
The running tension between the ideologue speechwriters and the pragmatic senior staffers—whether in its constructive period in the first term under Baker and Darman or during its destructive phase under Regan and the Mice—remains a fascinating aspect of his administration. Each side was sure that it was right: The conservative speechwriters were simply trying to give back to Reagan what he had been saying for thirty years. The moderates composed most of Reagan’s inner circle and spent hours with him daily. “Reagan at the time shared the political realism of his aides,” Lou Cannon wrote. “He placed a high premium on success throughout his various careers, and he often complained that some of his erstwhile conservative supporters wanted to go ‘off the cliff with all flags flying.’”
Several speechwriters came to see Reagan’s hidden hand at work in the setup. “When I look back now I see the tensions of those times as the consequence of critical but competing priorities that Reagan himself set in motion and allowed to persist,” Ben Elliott said. “The priorities of the Baker/Darman group were to govern successfully. The speechwriters were mindful of the responsibility but sought to rally the country and the world around the president’s larger vision of the boundless possibilities of freedom, free ideas and free people.”
Clark Judge, a Harvard Business School graduate who joined the staff in 1986 after writing for Vice President Bush—following the path trod by Peter Robinson and Josh Gilder before him—surmised that Reagan was using a technique he picked up from his days as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan had taken the Guild on strike and had learned the art of negotiation with the union. The true believers “help Reagan stake out his positions,” Judge argued. “And where do the pragmatists come in? They help Reagan cut his deals…. It’s not that we’re right and they’re wrong or that they’re right and we’re wrong. Reagan is very deliberately using us both.”
“I’m Not Going to Dance
on the Berlin Wall”
SUMMER 1988
“Know where I want to go—have the experience to get there—jobs, peace, education,” Vice President George H. W. Bush wrote to his campaign speechwriter, Peggy Noonan. And: “My background is one thing…I’ve worked, I’ve fought for my country, I’ve served, I’ve built—I want to lead.” In the summer of 1988, trying to capture the White House himself, Bush sent Noonan a stream of notes and thoughts to prepare for his speech accepting his party’s presidential nomination. “Others may speak better, look better, be smoother, more creative but I must be myself. I want you to know my heartbeat—this is where I’d lead.”
He sent a list of words that had special meaning for him. It included “kindness,” “caring,” “decency,” and “heart”—words that inspired Noonan to write a sentence into a draft of the speech that read: “I wanted a kinder nation.” Bush scribbled “gentler” in next to it.
Bush’s desire for a “kinder, gentler” America was one of three lines in his convention address that lingered in the public memory longer than almost anything he said as president. Senior campaign officials resisted “kinder, gentler” and the comparison of the groups that make up America to “a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky,”* thinking the lines sounded soft. Not Richard Darman, the former Reagan administration official who would become Bush’s budget director—“Make sure that is always in,” he said of the points of light.
Darman had his own reasons: He hoped Noonan might reciprocate by helping remove the “Read my lips: No new taxes” line. Echoing Clint Eastwood, it would make Bush look tough. But Darman thought a president should not lock himself into such a position, and he argued that the line would sound inauthentic coming from Bush. “From the perspective of the campaign, however—down by ten points—I was indulging in the fantasy of governing without attending to the prior imperative of winning,” he later wrote. The line stayed in.
Charges that the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, was soft on crime, insufficiently patriotic, and a tax-raising liberal combined with Ronald Reagan’s enduring popularity and, of course, “Read my lips…” to carry Bush to 53 percent of the vote and 426 electoral votes on November 8, 1988.
He met with his speechwriters in the Roosevelt Room early in his term and spoke about what he expected in speeches, what he liked, what he did not like. He gave the writers three rules. The first was that he did not like the word “I.” “He didn’t want to say, ‘I want a crime bill that’s going to stop crime,’ because he thought that was disrespectful to the police who actually had to put their lives on the line,” recalled Mary Kate Grant, whose job was writing magazine articles under the president’s byline. The second rule was that they should not write speeches that were too emotional. “If you give me a ten, I’m going to send it back and say, ‘Give me an eight,’” Grant recalled Bush saying. “And you’ll be lucky if I deliver like a six.” Bush’s third rule was that the writers should use a lot of Yogi Berra quotes. I would rather quote Yogi Berra than Thomas
Jefferson, he said.
One of the writers asked him who else he liked to quote. Eisenhower, he said, and Mark Twain. Bush said that he wanted them to write his speeches imagining that they were addressing an audience in Lubbock, Texas—a typical middle-America town. He wanted things written in a clear, direct manner. “The president detested anything that smacked of the florid or the smarmily insincere,” speechwriter Mark Davis recalled. Bush specifically said that he did not like the way Lyndon Johnson had used “my fellow Americans.”
Bush told them a story about Ronald Reagan. Vice President Bush had been going with Reagan to an event and as they were getting into the limousine an aide handed Reagan his speech cards, apologizing for their lateness. “No problem,” Reagan said, and read through the cards, marking them for pauses and emphasis. Bush asked if this was the first time he had seen the remarks. “Yes,” Reagan replied, “but it will be okay, don’t worry about it.” At the event Reagan knocked the speech out of the ballpark.
“I am not President Reagan,” Bush told his speechwriters. I couldn’t be if I wanted to. Reagan was acknowledged as a master of speechmaking—he was the “Great Communicator.” And his administration had revolutionized the art of presidential stagecraft—consciously arranging events to showcase a specific sound bite or image. Bush and his top advisers did not attach the same value to speechmaking that Reagan had. In the Bush administration, image would flow from substance—no special crafting would be required.* “He felt that he would be judged—and should be judged—on actions and on decisions and on policies,” recalled David Demarest, Bush’s communications director. “This kind of atmosphere of you’re going to be a successful or not successful president depends on how [good] of an orator you are—he just didn’t buy into that. It wasn’t in his DNA.”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 41